I propose a chronological history of English poetry from the Anglo-Saxon period to the beginning of modernism (after the end of the First World War). Such a history will have to begin episodically and only achieve something like complete continuity starting with the late fourteenth century. The principles of Anglo-Saxon verse were only fully rediscovered in the nineteenth century, and Old English itself was unreadable to writers literate in Middle and Modern English. Nevertheless two through-lines, one thematic and one explicitly historical, can structure the book. Historically, until at least the nineteenth century a significant number of influential poets could read and often compose in Latin (and sometimes Greek: Hopkins’s English poetry owes as much to his training in Greek composition as to his immersion in Welsh). Latin therefore provides a kind of lingua franca which not only exercises very strong influence on English poets down the generations but also allows for a developing vocabulary about poetic form. And it is poetic form that allows for a second and more important through-line, since (this will be the central argument in the book) whatever else poetry does it must define itself as poetry, and must therefore define the possibilities and limitations within which and against which it works.
Such possibilities and limitations will be vast, including not only the history of poetry as any poet understands it (the kind of thing Harold Bloom is so interested in, including Milton’s intention that Paradise Lost should be a model “of ancient liberty recover'd to heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing”), but also the history of poetry as critics understand it (so that Hopkins and Bridges, for example, write to prove Saintsbury wrong about stress, just as Spenser writes against Harvey), to which must be added the material, historical, political, and cultural circumstances of its composition. These contexts are of course massive, which is just why it is so important to have a through-line. Taking poetry’s developing and changing self-conception and active self-definition as this through-line makes it possible to refer to relevant circumstances and contexts as needed.
To sum up I’ll try to demonstrate that the history of poetry is in large part a history of its own definition and therefore a history of its forms. Inevitably the project will have to broaden out as we approach the post-World War I years, not only because the number of poets increases so tremendously but also because the rise of English as an international language has major repercussions on its use even in England, let alone Great Britain. I’ll conclude, the main part of the survey, therefore, with Yeats, and then provide an afterword about how the main currents I’ve sketched out feed the pool of twentieth and twenty-first century poetry in English.
